Monday, February 04, 2002

Posted by Mike Tarrani
5:42 PM
Here's a question: What is your interest level in policies, processes and procedures for the following?

change control

issue management

user profile management

data center facilities management

Linda and I have enough material to produce a set of generic documents for each of these. We also have a complete and comprehensive project plan that includes a work breakdown structure, critical path analysis and estimates for tasks and deliverables for a service level management project. This also includes SLA templates, a risk-adjusted estimating worksheet and other artifacts.

One idea is to sell them in Word and Excel format, allowing clients to customize them to their own needs and organization. This will greatly shorten the development and implementation time for these critical processes, which adds to their value. Another idea is to sell them in PDF format as guidelines and idea resources.

An initial strategy was to price the Word/Excel collection at a premium, and the PDF files at a reduced price since they are difficult to customize, but still have value. Another idea is to give away the PDF collection as locked files that can only be viewed (not printed) as a see-before-you-buy option, and sell the Word/Excel versions. That is the direction in which we're leaning.

We are also leaning towards selling them by topic because the entire collection may be overkill, such as in the case of an organization that has existing issue management processes and procedures, but wants a more mature change control process.

The difficult part from our viewpoint is pricing. How much should we charge? Here we're leaning towards a pricing strategy that is in the $49.95 range for each topic area with rights limited to single companies. For consultants we're toying with the idea of a license scheme whereby each topic is priced at $495.00 and can be resold to clients as tailored documents.